Monthly Archives: May 2018

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Buy us Some Media – Spigot, Inc is Hiring for Media Buyers

CTR, CPC and CPA are acronyms you use on a daily basis, even though your friends can’t understand what you’re saying. Showing users the perfect ad at the perfect time is your thing! If you know anything about Funko Pop it’s a big plus but not a requirement.

Spigot, Inc has a very cool, laid back environment that has recliners and couches if you’d like to get away from your desk. The break room is filled with fun games for when you need to breakaway from your regular routine. Our ping pong and foosball tables are used frequently. Can you make the rankings chart? We also have free lunches, unlimited snacks and free beer if you need to relax at the end of the day. Spigot, Inc is ready to change the way you work! We have amazing healthcare and 401K plans to keep you healthy and prepare for your future.

Be sure check out the culture on our blog as well and let us know if you’re a fit for Spigot, Inc.

Position Overview

The SEM Specialist’s main goal is to grow app installs through keyword-based advertising on Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and/or other networks as necessary. Primary duties include:

  1. Campaign Management: Develop, deploy, and optimize search campaigns which drive traffic to our proprietary application portals.
  2. Research & Analysis: Conduct market/competitor research to be leveraged in the execution of campaigns; Analyze conversion data, identify trends, and optimize campaigns to meet agreed upon CPA targets and ROI goals.
  3. Testing: Aggressively A/B test ad copy to maximize CTR.
  4. Business Development: Independently identify and present new campaign opportunities to appropriate stakeholders.

Candidate Overview

The successful candidate will be an inspiring and confident leader with at least:

    • 3-5 years digital media buying experience
    • Expert-level understanding of Google AdWords
    • Strong knowledge of Bing Ads preferred
    • Experience managing high budget and high volume campaigns
    • Basic familiarity with Excel
    • Basic HTML knowledge is a plus

The successful candidate will also demonstrate the following abilities:

    • Communication (written & oral): Must have strong interpersonal skills and the ability to establish, develop, and maintain business relationships. Must also have excellent presentation and negotiation skills.
    • Proven Track Record: Have a successful work history of meeting deadlines and commitments.
    • Adaptability: Capable of adjusting to quickly shifting priorities.
    • Resourceful: Looks for ways to achieve goals utilizing available resources.
    • Industry Knowledge: Have a solid understanding of how online display and search advertising works.
    • Team Player: Demonstrates a strong ability to support department staff members and managers, and establish collaborative relationships with peers.
    • Desire to Win: Willingness to go above and beyond specific requirements and desire to exceed expectations.

Measurements of Success 

There are several key measurements of success this employee will use to benchmark performance including:

    • Grow user base below the target cost per acquisition
    • Increase book of business through new opportunities and campaign

If you feel like you have the drive and passion to launch your career in dynamic and laid back culture, Spigot, Inc would like to speak with you. Send your resume and cover letter to careers@spigot.com for review! Check out all of our adventures on the Spigot Inc blog.

Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram… like us on Facebook and never miss out on the Spigot Inc lifestyle.

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Spigot, Inc is Hiring ANOTHER Business Intelligence Analyst

We keep growing and growing and growing at the Spigot, Inc Fort Myers office! If you thrive on increasing profits and efficiency by digging into data and product performance, continue reading below.

Spigot, Inc has a very cool, laid back environment that has recliners and couches if you’d like to get away from your desk. The break room is filled with fun games for when you need to breakaway from the data. Our ping pong and foosball tables are used frequently. Can you make the rankings chart? We also have free lunches, unlimited snacks and free beer if you need to relax at the end of the day. Spigot, Inc is ready to change the way you work! We have amazing healthcare and 401K plans to keep you healthy and prepare for your future.

Be sure check out the culture on our blog as well and let us know if you’re a fit for Spigot, Inc.

Position Overview

The Business Intelligence Analyst will be responsible for completing profit-driven analysis to provide recommendations on how to increase profits and efficiency on all aspects of the business as necessary; especially those related to product performance. This person is able to present ideas in the morning, implement them in the afternoon and later check the performance of their idea via data analysis. Primary duties include:

    1. Ad-hoc queries using MSSQL Server and other RDBMS
    2. Data manipulation and presentation in Excel
    3. Tracking and analysis of Key Performance Indicators such as profit, user value, click through & conversion rates, traffic volumes, etc.
    4. Development and execution of new reports (trends, opportunities, etc.) to boost the business intelligence of the team.

Performing market place intelligence and refining information into actionable recommendations to Product Development team members.

The successful candidate will be an inspiring and confident leader with at least:

    • Practical experience with Excel (pivot tables, vlookup, etc)
    • Proficiency in SQL (select/from/where clauses, etc)

The successful candidate will also demonstrate the following abilities:

    • Independent Decision Making: Uses intelligence, analysis, consistent rationality and objectivity when making decisions; Anticipates consequences of judgments with the ability to work autonomously with little supervision and a high attention to detail and quality.
    • Energetic: The ability to find solutions and deliver results within a rapid, fast changing, entrepreneurial, technology-driven culture; Passion for technology and a positive, can-do attitude is a must.
    • Adaptability: Capable of adjusting to changing priorities, and possesses the ability to master new technologies in a short period of time.
    • Results-Oriented and Data Driven: Must be a data driven decision maker who loves impacting the bottom line and achieves goals with available resources and abilities.
    • Communication (written & oral): Must have strong interpersonal skills and the ability to establish, develop and maintain cross-functional business relationships, as well as have excellent presentation and problem-solving skills.

Measurements of Success

There are several key measurements of success this employee will use to benchmark performance including:

  • Improving the effectiveness of the product development team through relevant analysis, planning and reporting.
  • Growing the business through insightful reporting and analysis.
  • Advancing the productivity of the team through skilled planning, research, and operational efficiencies.

If you feel like you have the drive and passion to launch your career in dynamic and laid back culture, Spigot, Inc would like to speak with you. Send your resume and cover letter to careers@spigot.com for review! Again, check out all of our adventures on the Spigot Inc blog.

Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram… like us on Facebook and never miss out on the Spigot Inc lifestyle.

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Ryan Stephens, Spigot Inc’s President Speaks at Sir Yu’s Palace

Spigot, Inc’s President Ryan Stephens and a crew of Spigot, Inc’s best and brightest headed east to Beijing for the China Public Investor Presentation hosted by our parent company, Genimous.  Ryan and members of the Board spent a long afternoon answering tough questions for 30 investors and analysts, and by all accounts knocked it out of the park (as usual!).  But the real star of the show was the venue itself: the gorgeous and historic Genimous Palace HQ, known to the locals as “Sir Yu’s Mansion”.

“Is the Genimous headquarters really a palace?” you rightly ask?  Yes!  While Beijing is well-known for its modern architecture, it has a history stretching back 3000 years, and the Genimous building is a no-kidding palace in a complex that dates back to 1640.  Originally owned by the great-grandson of famed chieftain Nurhachi in the Qing dynasty, it was passed down through the hands of nobility and royalty and eventually came to be owned by Prince He Mianxun’s grandson Puyu in 1902 — hence, “Sir Yu’s Mansion”.  Today, it’s the headquarters of all the Genimous divisions.  Nice!

Are you an entrepreneurial-minded tech star, marketing guru, or data geek who likes to hang out at Qing-dynasty palaces?  If so, send your resume and cover letter to careers@spigot.com and we’ll check it out!  The Spigot, Inc team makes frequent visits to the Beijing offices and our offices around the world, and we’d love to have you join us on our adventures!

 

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Mobile Ad Fraud is on the Rise

If you use your mobile device as much as we do at Spigot, Inc, I’m sure you are seeing an increase of mobile ads. Unfortunately, some of these are scams. Be on the lookout. AdWeek shares the full story.

Mobile ad fraud is in the midst of a period of rampant innovation.

That was the takeaway of a recent report from app marketing firm Adjust, which found that the rate of fake app-installs, clicks, attributions and other mobile scams doubled in the past year alone. The company said around 7.3 percent of the 3.4 billion app-installs and 350 billion interactions it monitored in the first quarter of the year showed evidence of fraud.

Adjust’s ad fraud specialist, Andreas Naumann, said the spike was the result of bad actors creating new ways of tricking marketers, giving those fraudsters a leg up in the constant cat-and-mouse fight.

“2017 was the year of innovation and evolution for fraudsters,” Naumann said. “A lot has happened.”

Much of that innovation involves a method of faking app installs called SDK spoofing, in which hackers are able to make it appear as if a download has taken place by breaking into the communication line between developer-side analytics tools and back-end servers. This type of fraud is harder to spot than conventional methods of faking installs because it traces back to real users rather than imaginary ones.

Continue the story on AdWeek.

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Facebook Requests Users to Update their Privacy Settings

Spigot, Inc learned that Facebook will ask users to update their privacy settings. Look out for this prompt and make sure your settings are to your satisfaction.

Starting this week, Facebook will begin asking users worldwide to review their privacy settings with a prompt that appears within the Facebook app. The experience will ask you to review how Facebook uses your personal data across a range of products, from ad targeting to facial recognition. This request to review Facebook’s updated terms and your settings follows a similar experience rolled out to users in the European Union as a result of the new user data privacy regulation, GDPR.

Continue the story on TechCrunch…

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Trustworthy Environments are the Place to be for Ads

Are you more likely to click on an ad if you are reading it online on the Wall Street Journal site? According to this article from AdWeek… Spigot, Inc learns that most of us do!

You might’ve guessed that ad campaigns perform better when they’re viewed in a high quality and trusted editorial environment. Now new research backs that up.

The research was released by World Media Group, a collection of 10 international media brands, including Bloomberg Media Group, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Washington Post and its newest member, Reuters.

“Hopefully this will mean marketers, advertisers, the whole ecosystem will relook at the importance of journalistic platforms,” said Rupert Turnbull, vice president, EMEA & LatAm at Meredith, which owns Time and Fortune.

Digital inventory across all those brands outperformed Moat benchmarks by between 16 percent and 73 percent in 2017, according to an independent analysis from SaaS analytics and Moat, which WMG released.

“I don’t think anything’s changed, I just think this is a piece of research that just demonstrates what I think is something we instinctively know,” Turnbull said. “Campaigns perform better, generally, when the consideration of context is included in the campaign planning and the media planning.”

The average amount of time a reader was on the page with the window in-focus was 72 percent higher than the Moat benchmark in 2017. The year prior, it was 9 percent higher.

The length of time an ad was active and in-view was 51 percent higher last year, compared to 19 percent higher in 2016.

“We’ve had so much success in content creation because a lot of brands come to us for that,” Turnbull said. “What this shows is that actually, it’s not just about using us for branded content, but as a platform for advertisers generally.”

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It’s Time to Monetize on Facebook Stories

Facebook stories have become very popular and now it’s time to monetize. “Advertisers can extend their Instagram Stories ads to Facebook Stories, or have Facebook reformat their News Feed ads with color-matched image borders and ad copy text shown at the bottom.” Spigot, Inc shares the news from TechCrunch.

After 14 months of silence since launching, Facebook Stories has finally announced a 150 million daily active user count for its Snapchat Stories clone. And now it’s time to earn some money off it. Facebook Stories will start testing its first ads today in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil.

They’re 5- to 15-second video ads users can skip, and while there’s no click-through or call to action now, Facebook plans to add that in the coming months. Advertisers can easily extend their Instagram Stories ads to this new surface, or have Facebook automatically reformat their News Feed ads with color-matched borders and text at the bottom. Facebook also plans to give businesses more metrics on their Stories performance to convince them the feature is worth their ad dollars.

Continue the article on TechCrunch.

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Google Chrome Mutes AutoPlay Videos Based on User Behavior

Thanks Google! Have you fallen victim of visiting a site and you’re in a meeting or at your desk and in a quiet environment when your computer starts talking? This has happened to most of us at Spigot, Inc! If you find this annoying, you will be happy to read from TechCrunch that Chrome and other browsers have muted this autoplay feature. The best news to Spigot, Inc is that it is based on user behavior, which we value above all.

There’s little that’s more annoying on the web than videos that start playing automatically and with their volume up. Over the course of the last few years, Chrome and other browser vendors have started to combat this, but for the most part, those solutions relied on the user explicitly taking action. Now, following the launch of a similar feature on mobile, Chrome on desktop is also getting much smarter about which sites it’ll allow to autoplay and which it’ll block — and it’ll learn from your behavior to personalize this feature.

Google says a “significant number of autoplays” are paused and muted, or have their tabs closed, within six seconds. I’m actually guessing most people close those tabs faster, but six seconds seems like a good enough measure to know whether a user wanted to hear the sound from a video or not.

Going forward, Google will learn from your own browsing behavior and learn which sites you’ll want to mute. For users who aren’t logged in — or who are new to Chrome — the browser will automatically mute about 1,000 sites by default based on that six-second measure it’s using to detect annoying sites.

Be sure to continue reading on TechCrunch for the full story.

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